Reflecting on the crucifixion of Christ, the liberal Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch claimed, “It requires no legal fiction of imputation to explain that ‘he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.’ Solidarity explains it.” He goes on to note six social causes of the cross: 1) “religious bigotry,” 2) “graft and political power,” 3) “the corruption of justice,” 4) “mob spirit and mob action,” 5) “militarism,” and 6) “class contempt.” Underscoring his point, he adds, “Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul.” He insists that these constitute “the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered.”
Rauschenbusch wrote at a time when, in Protestant circles, socially conscious “liberal” theology had become divided from traditionally minded “conservative” theology, a division that often persists today. Putting aside the question of how traditional an understanding of the cross as legal imputation really is, it is fair to say that despite trying to appeal to all Christians, his efforts likely only contributed to furthering the divide. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works.” Or, we might say, Christians disagree about how the cross works, but they all agree that it does.
Credit should be given to Rauschenbusch, however, for perceiving a real dimension of the cross: It does represent all the “social sin” he identifies, and more. Indeed, his point becomes much weightier if we do, in fact, affirm traditional Church teaching about Christ. Anyone who suffers these and any other injustices and evils in this world can have confidence that God himself has suffered them, too, and that he suffers even now with them.
One of the most enigmatic sayings of Christ from the cross is his cry, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). Too often popular commentators miss that Christ, who is God incarnate and as the Son of God inseparable from the Father, is actually quoting the first line of Psalm 22 (or 21 in some Bibles). Matthew’s Gospel even alludes to this same psalm just a few verses earlier. The chief priests, scribes, and elders of the people, St. Matthew tells us, mocked Jesus, saying, “He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him” (Matt. 27:44). Similarly, Psalm 22:7–8 states,
All those who see Me ridicule Me;
They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,
“He trusted in the Lord, let Him rescue Him.”
The psalmist continues to say,
Dogs have surrounded Me;
The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me.
They pierced My hands and My feet. (v. 16)
Matthew even notes how another verse of this psalm was fulfilled when the Romans, at the behest of a mob, unjustly “pierced” the hands and feet of Christ: “Then they crucified Him, and divided His garments, casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet:
‘They divided My garments among them,
And for My clothing they cast lots.’” (Matt. 27:35; cf. Ps. 22:18)
All this warrants reading Christ’s cry of dereliction, “Why have you forsaken me?,” in the light of Psalm 22, and Psalm 22 in the light of Christ.
According to the psalm, the righteous one’s call to God does not go unheeded. Rather, verse 21 represents a pivot point, beginning with the words, “You have answered me.” Readers and hearers are exhorted to praise the Lord with him “in the midst of the assembly” (v. 22—literally “church” in the Greek). Why?
For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
Nor has He hidden His face from Him;
But when He cried to Him, He heard. (v. 24)
To Rauschenbusch’s point about the social context of the cross, because the Lord heard the cry of Christ from the cross, and because the story does not end with Christ’s death but rather with his Resurrection, “The poor shall eat and be satisfied” (v. 26), and
All those who go down to the dust
Shall bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep himself alive. (v. 29)
Indeed, all those who suffer now can be confident, even “he who cannot keep himself alive,” that “He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted” (v. 24). If Christ suffered with us, then we can be consoled with him as well. What may have seemed at the moment to be a victory of bigotry, hatred, corruption, injustice, sin, death, and the devil, through the Resurrection, becomes their defeat and the only possible answer that can be made to the problem of evil.
When we suffer these things, we want an explanation, or else others, seeking to console us, will try to offer one (as in the case of Job’s friends). But as St. Athanasius points out, “Evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.” Evil is irrational, and therefore fundamentally unexplainable. The only way to explain that 2 + 2 isn’t 5 is to demonstrate that 2 + 2 is 4. The only answer to evil is to “overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21), as Jesus Christ did through his death and Resurrection. The consolation of the cross in the midst of our suffering is that no amount of evil can ever overcome the goodness of God, who, though impassible, willingly suffers with us in Christ.
With that consolation, with that abundant life of the Resurrection, let us, too, praise the Lord “in the great Church” (Ps. 22:25, my translation), and let us, in our modern world of abundance, be the fulfillment of the prophecy that “the poor shall eat and be satisfied” (v. 26) and that even the dying shall be cared for and comforted.
In this sense the gospel is, indeed, social. And others will glorify “our Father in heaven,” not through our endless condemnation of “social sin,” but when we “let [our] light so shine before men, that they may see [our] good works” (Matt. 5:16). Then the cross will “make sense,” not in all its genuine, irrational horror, but precisely in the defeat of that horror by the one who bore all our infirmities, pointing his followers to the first words of the most perfect psalm to demonstrate their consolation and inspire them to console one another.
